Emotions cannot be permanent. That's why they are called "emotions" , the word comes from "motion", movement. They move; hence, they are "emotions". From one to another you continually change. This moment you are sad, that moment you are happy; this moment you are angry, that moment you are compassionate. This moment you are loving, another moment full of hatred; the morning was beautiful, the evening is ugly. And this goes on. This cannot be your nature, because all these changes something is needed like a thread that holds all of them together.

In a garland you see flowers, but you don't see the thread. These emotions are like the flowers of a garland. Sometimes anger flowers, sometimes sadness flowers, sometimes happiness, sometimes pain, sometimes anguish. These are the flowers , and your whole life is the garland. There must be a thread; otherwise you would have fallen apart long ago. You continue as an entity, so what is the thread, the plestar? What is permanent in you?

First Things First

The Mechanics of the Mind

Your emotions, your sentiments, your thoughts, the whole paraphernalia of the mind, are manipulated by the outside. Scientifically, it has become more clear now, but even without scientific investigation the mystics have been saying exactly the same thing for thouusands of years, that all these things your mind is filled with are not yours; yu are beyond them. You get identified with them, and that's the only problem.

For example, somebody insults you and you become angry. You think you are becoming angry, but scientifically speaking the other person's insult is only functioning as a remote control. The person who has insulted you is managing your behavior. Your anger is in his hands; you are behaving like a puppet.

Now scientists are able to put electrodes in the brain at certain centers, and it is almost unelievable. The mystics have been talking about it for htousands of years, but only recently has science discovered that there are hundreds of centers in the rain controlling all your behaviours. An electrode can be put at a particular center, for example, the center for anger. Nobody insults you , nobody humiliates you , nobody says anything to you; you are sitting silently, happily, and somebody pushes a buttom on a remote control and you become angry!. It is a very strange feeling because you cannot seee the reason anywhere, why you are becoming angry. Perhaps you will rationalize it somehow. You see a man passing by in the hallway and you remeber that he insulted you, you will find some rationalization just to console yourself that you are not going mad. Sitting silently... and suddenly feeling so angry without any provocation?.

An the same remote controller can work to make you happy. Sitting in your chair you start giggling, and you look all around, if somebody is wathing you he will think you are going crazy!. Nobody has said anything, nothing has happened, nobody has slipped on a banana peel, so why are you giggling?. You will rationalize it, you will try to find some rationa grounds for giggling. And the strangest thing is that the next time the same buttom is pushed and you giggle, you will again come up with the same rationale, the same consolation, the same explanation, not even the rationalization is yours!. It is almost like a gramophone record.

When I was reading about the scientific investigations into these centers, I was reminded of my student days. I was a competitor in an inter-university debate; all the universities ofthe country were participating. The Sanskrit University of Varanasi was also participating, but naturally the students from the Sanskrit University were feeling a little inferior compared with competitors from other universities. They knew ancient scriptures, they knew Sanskrit poetry, drama, but they were not familiar with the contemporary world of art, literature, philosophy or logic. And the inferiority complex works in very strange ways...

Just after I had spoken, the next person was the representative from the Sanskrit University. And just to impress the audience and to hide his inferiority complex he started his speech with a quotation from Bertrand Russell -- he had crammed it, and Sanskrit students are more capable of cramming things than anybody else. But his stage fright was such.... he knew nothing about Bertrand Russell, he knew nothing about what he was quoting. It would have been better to have quoted something from Sanskrit because he would have been more at ease.

In the middle he stopped -- just in the middle of a sentence. And I was sitting by his side, because I had just finished. There was silence, and he was perspiring. And just to help him, I said, "Start again" -- because what else to do? he was simply stuck. "And if you cannot go ahead, you start again; perhaps it may come back to you."

So he started again: "Brothers and sisters..." and at exactly the same point he got stuck again. Now it became a joke. The whole hall was shouting, "Again!" and he was in such a difficult situation. Neither could he go ahead nor could he keep standing there silent -- it looked very idiotic. So he had to start again. But he would start again, "Brothers and sisters..."

For a whole fifteen minutes we heard only that portion: "Brothers and sisters..." up to the point where he got stuck, again and again. When his time was finished he came and sat next to me. He said, "You destroyed my whole thing!"

I said, "I was trying to help you."

He said, "This is help?"

I said, "You were going to be in difficulty anyway. This way at least everybody enjoyed it except you -- that I can understand, but you should rejoice that you made so many people happy. And why did you choose that quotation? When I was saying to you, `Start again' there was no need to start over -- you could have dropped that quotation, there was no need to begin again from the very beginning."

But I came to know through reading the scientific research that the speech center is exactly like a gramophone record, but with one thing very strange and special: the moment the needle is taken away from the record you cannot put the needle back where you took it from. Once it is taken away, it will have to begin again exactly at the beginning. The center instantly goes back to the beginning.

And if this happens, can you say you are the master of what you are saying? Are you the master of what you are feeling? Certainly there are no electrodes scientifically put into you, but biologically exactly the same work is going on.

You see a certain woman, and immediately your mind reacts: "How beautiful!" This is nothing but remote control. That woman functioned like a remote control and your speech center simply went into a recorded speech: "How beautiful!"

Mind is a mechanism. It is not you. It records things from outside, and then reacts to outside situations according to the recordings. That's the only difference between a Hindu and a Mohammedan and a Christian and a Jew -- they have just got different gramophone records. Inside it is one humanity. And do you think when you play a gramophone record... it may be in Hebrew, it may be in Sanskrit, it may be in Persian, it may be in Arabic, but it is the same machine that plays the record. To the machine it does not matter whether it plays Hebrew or Sanskrit.

All your religions, all your political ideas, all your cultural attitudes are nothing but recordings. And in certain situations certain recordings are provoked.

There is a beautiful incident in the life of one of the very wisest kings of India, Raja Dhoj. He was very much interested in wise people. His whole treasury was open only for one purpose -- to collect all the wise people of the country, whatsoever the cost. His capital was Ujjain, and he had thirty of the country's most famous people in his court. It was the most precious court in the whole country.

One of the greatest poets of the world, Kalidas, was one of the members of the court of Raja Dhoj. One day a man appeared at the court saying that he spoke thirty languages with the same fluency, the same accuracy and accent as any native person could, and he had come to make a challenge: "Hearing that you have in your court the wisest people of the country, here are one thousand gold pieces..."

The rupee used to be golden. We should stop calling it the rupee now, because the word `rupee' comes from the word rupya. `Rupya' means gold. It went on falling from gold to silver, from silver to something else. Now it is just paper and you go on calling it `rupee'. The very word means gold.

And he said, "Anybody who can recognize my mother tongue, these one thousand gold pieces are his. And if he cannot recognize it, then he will have to give me one thousand gold pieces."

There were great scholars there, and everybody knows that whatever you do, you can never speak any language the way you can speak your own mother tongue because every other language has to be learned by effort. Only the mother tongue is spontaneous -- you don't even learn it, just... the very situation and you start speaking it. It has a spontaneity. That's why even Germans who call their country `fatherland'.... That is the only country which calls itself `fatherland'. All other countries call their land `motherland'. But even the Germans don't call their language `father tongue'. Every language is called a mother tongue because the child starts learning from the mother, and anyway the father never has the chance to speak in the house. It is always the mother who is speaking -- father is listening.

Many took the challenge. He spoke in thirty languages -- a few pieces in one language, a few pieces in another language -- and it was really hard; he was certainly a master artist. He was speaking each language the way only a native can speak his own mother language. All of the thirty great scholars lost. The competition continued for thirty days, and every day one person took the challenge and lost it. The man would say, "This is not my mother tongue."

On the thirty-first day.... King Dhoj had been continually saying to Kalidas, "Why don't you accept the challenge? -- because a poet knows language in a more delicate way, with all its nuances, more than anybody else." But Kalidas remained silent. He had been watching for thirty days, trying to find out which language the man spoke with more ease, with more spontaneity, with more joy. But he could not manage to find any difference, he spoke all the languages in exactly the same way.

On the thirty-first day, Kalidas asked King Dhoj and all the wise people to stand outside in front of the court. There was a long row of steps and the man was coming up; as he came up to the last step, Kalidas pushed him down. And as he fell rolling down the steps, anger came up -- he shouted. And Kalidas said, "This is your mother tongue!" Because in anger you cannot remember, and the man had not been expecting this to be a challenge.

And that actually was his mother tongue. Deepest in his mind, the recording was of the mother tongue.

One of my professors used to say -- he lived all over the world, teaching in different universities -- that "Only in two situations in life have I been in difficulty in different countries -- fighting or falling in love. In those times one remembers one's mother tongue. However beautifully you express your love, it is not the same, it seems superficial. And when you are angry and fighting in somebody else's language, you cannot have that joy...."

He said, "Those are two very significant situations -- fighting and loving -- and mostly they are together with the same person. With the same person you are in love, with that same person you have to fight."

And he was right, that everything remains superficial -- you can neither sing a beautiful song nor can you use real four-letter words of your language. In both cases, it remains lukewarm.

Mind certainly is a mechanism for recording experiences from the outside, and reacting and responding accordingly. It is not you. But unfortunately the psychologists think mind is all, beyond mind there is nothing. That means you are nothing but impressions from the outside. You don't have any soul of your own. The very idea of the soul is also given by the outside.

This is where the mystics are different: they will agree absolutely that about the mind, the contemporary scientific research is right. But it is not right about man's total personality. Beyond mind, there is an awareness which is not given by the outside and which is not an idea -- and there is no experiment up to now which has found any center in the brain which corresponds to awareness.

The whole work of religion, of meditation is to make you aware of all that is mind and disidentify yourself with it. When the mind is angry, you should think, "It is simply a gramophone record." When the mind is sad, you should simply remember: it is only a gramophone record.

A certain situation is pressing the remote controller, and you feel sad, you feel angry, you feel frustrated, you feel worried, you feel tense -- all these things are coming from the outside, and the mind is responding to them. But you are the watcher. You are not the actor. It is not your reaction.

Hence the whole art of meditation is to learn awareness, alertness, consciousness. While you are feeling angry, don't repress it; let it be there. Just become aware. See it as if it is some object outside you. Slowly slowly, go on cutting your identifications with the mind. Then you have found your real individuality, your being, your soul.

Finding this awareness is enlightenment -- you have become luminous. You are no more in darkness, and you are no more just a puppet in the hands of the mind. You are a master, not a servant. Now the mind cannot react automatically, autonomously -- the way it used to do before. It needs your permission. Somebody insults you, and you don't want to be angry....

Gautam Buddha used to say to his disciples that, "To be angry is so stupid that it is inconceivable that intelligent human beings go on doing it. Somebody else is doing something and you are getting angry. He may be doing something wrong, he may be saying something wrong, he may be making some effort to humiliate you, to insult you -- but that is his freedom. If you react, you are a slave. And if you say to the person, "It is your joy to insult me, it is my joy not to be angry," you are behaving like a master.

And unless this master becomes crystal clear in you, crystallized, you don't have any soul. You are just a phonograph record. As you grow older, your recording goes on becoming more and more. You become more knowledgeable. People think you are becoming wiser -- you are simply becoming a donkey loaded with scriptures.

Wisdom consists only of one thing, not of knowing many things but of knowing only one thing: that is your awareness and its separation from the mind. Just try watching in small things, and you will be surprised. People go on doing the same things every day. They go on deciding to do something, and they go on repenting because they have not done it; it becomes a routine. Everything you do is not new. The things which have been giving you misery, sadness, worries, wounds, and you don't want -- somehow mechanically you go on doing these things again and again as if you are helpless. And you will remain helpless unless you create a separation between mind and awareness.

That very separation is the greatest revolution that can happen to man. And from that very moment your life is a life of continuous celebration -- because you need not do anything that harms you, you need not do anything that makes you miserable. Now you can do and act on only that which makes you more joyous, fulfills you, gives you contentment, makes your life a piece of art, a beauty. But this is possible only if the master in you is awake. Right now the master is fast asleep, and the servant is playing the role of master. And the servant is not your servant; the servant is created by the outside world, it belongs to the outside world, it follows the outside world and its laws.

This is the whole tragedy of human life: you are asleep, and the outside world is dominating you, creating your mind according to its own needs -- and the mind is a puppet. Once your awareness becomes a flame, it burns up the whole slavery that the mind has created. And there is no blissfulness more precious than freedom, than being a master of your own destiny.

Mind is not your friend. Either the mind is pretending to be the master or it has to be put into its right place as a servant -- but mind is not your friend. And the struggle for freedom, for bliss, for truth is not with the world; it is a fight with this puppet mind. It is very simple.

Kahlil Gibran has a beautiful story. The farmers in the villages, to protect their cultivated farms, create a false man: just a stick, another stick... it looks almost like a cross. And then they put a kurta on it, and a mud pot in place of the head. That's enough to make poor animals afraid that somebody may be standing there. The white kurta and two hands, in the night... somebody is watching. For the animals it is enough, they keep away from the farm. Gibran says, "Once I asked such a false man, `I can understand the farmer who made you, he needs you. I can understand the poor animals, they don't have great intelligence to see that you are bogus. But in rain, in sun, in hot summer, in cold winter you remain standing here -- for what?'

"And the false, bogus man said, `You don't know my joy. Just to make those animals afraid is such a joy that it is worth suffering rain, suffering sun, suffering heat, winter -- everything. I am making thousands of animals afraid! I know I am bogus, there is nothing inside me -- but I don't care about that. My joy is in making others afraid.'"

I want to ask you: would you like to be just like this bogus man -- nothing inside, making somebody afraid, making somebody happy, making somebody humiliated, making somebody respectful? Is your life only for others? Will you ever look inside? Is there anybody in the house or not?

The people who are with me, their search is to find the master of the house. I say to you the master is there -- perhaps asleep, but he can be awakened. And once the master is awakened within you, your whole life takes new colors, new rainbows, new flowers, new music, new dances. For the first time you become alive. Before, you were only vegetating.

We have to seek and search for something inside, which is not dependent on the outside. That brings freedom, independence, and that brings a joy that is yours forever. That is real richness.

Deva means divine, bhaven means feeling. God is available not through thinking but through feeling. The door opens into reality not through the mind but through the heart. The greatest problem that modern man is facing is that the mind is trained too much and the heart is completely neglected – not only neglected but condemned too. Feelings are not allowed, feelings are repressed. The man of feelings is thought to be weak; the man of feeling is thought to be childish, immature. The man of feeling is thought to be not contemporary – primitive. There are so many condemnations of feeling and of the heart that naturally one becomes afraid of feelings. One starts learning how to cut off feelings and slowly slowly the heart is simply by-passed; one goes directly to the head. Slowly slowly the heart becomes nothing but an organ that pumps the blood, purifies the blood, and that’s all.

In the history of man, for the first time the heart is reduced into something utterly physiological – it is not. Hidden behind the physiology of the heart is the true heart but that true heart is not part of the physical body, so science cannot discover it. You will have to learn about it from the poets, painters, musicians, sculptors. And finally the secret key is kept by the mystics. But once you know that there is an inner chamber of your being – absolutely uncontaminated by education, society, culture; utterly free from Christianity, Hinduism, Islam; completely unpolluted by all that has been happening to the modern man, still virgin – once you have contacted that source of your being, your life is lived on a different plane.

That plane is divine. To live in the mind is the human plane, to live below the mind is the animal plane. To live beyond the mind, in the heart, is the divine plane. And with the heart we are connected with the whole: that is our connection.

All the meditations that we are devising here are meant for a single purpose: to throw you from your head into the heart, somehow to pull you out of the mire of the head into the freedom of the heart, somehow to make you aware that you are not just the head. The head is a beautiful mechanism; use it, but don’t be used by it. It has to serve your feelings. Once thinking serves feelings, everything is balanced. A great tranquillity and a great joy arise in your being, and not from anything outside but something from your own inner sources. It wells up, it transforms you, and not only you – it makes you so luminous that whosoever comes in contact with you will have a little taste of something unknown.